Self Care and the Subject in Foucault's History of Sexuality

The category of sexuality is endemic to the modern society that Foucault wrote in and in reference to. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault seeks to destabilize his readers' relationship with sexuality and what stems from it. In his broader work, he implores us to attend to the imperative "take care of yourself," which he claims gives us a route to encounter, resist, and modify force relations. In this paper, I analyze the dual meanings of subject and subjectification in Foucault's History of Sexuality. I then show how resistance is formulated in the context of this subject and then analyze how his notion of the care of the self serves as a critique of his first description of subjectification.